The Triumph of the Irrational
The Irrational is now nothing less than a demonic force driving us individually and collectively. With Technique now its chiefest expression, self-destructive instruments proliferate. Consider agriculture. First, crop production, which relies upon pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. These are highly sophisticated techniques created initially to solve the problem of production. Pesticides and herbicides contain known carcinogens. For example, Dyfonate, used for root worm control, is not biodegradable, and its ingredients are the same as those used in biological and chemical warfare.
Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Round-up, is used to kill milkweed in roadside ditches and so contributes to the decline of the Monarch population. The Greenpeace website “Bees in Decline” cites studies demonstrating a link between insecticides and the decline of honey bees. Two of our most important pollinators are being decimated by industrial agriculture.
In the Midwest, hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and soybeans require millions of gallons of synthesized chemicals. When these chemicals were introduced, most farmers chose to abandon millennia of farming practices and embrace artificial methods promoted by the federal government, state universities, the Farm Bureau and, above all by the belief that Science can solve all problems.
Nitrogen fertilizer, which is applied to millions of acres of corn crops, runs off into the Mississippi River, which delivers the nitrogen and phosphorus to the Gulf of Mexico where it kills the algae, which in turn depletes the oxygen, which results in massive fish kills.
Now consider animal production. Faced with a demand for increased production, the rationalist’s solution was to create animal confinements into which thousands of chickens or turkeys are thrown together, almost on top of one another. In the case of hogs, hundreds are placed in individual cages within a shed containing a thousand total. Confinement operations increase the animal’s susceptibility to infectious disease. Technicians solved that problem by adding antibiotics to the feed. If the antibiotics are in the animal long enough, the targeted bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics and, if their meat is improperly cooked, make us ill. In short, the cure for production, rational in essence, is ultimately self-destructive.
The genetic engineering of plants and animals is another example of the Irrational posing as the Rational. The hubris of the project is mythical in its dimensions: man playing God with Nature by redesigning plants and animals.
Since monocultures dominate agriculture, corporations want their redesigned corn or salmon the only source of corn or salmon. Since they have decoded the DNA for a multitude of plants and animals, corrupt courts have allowed them to register patents on these works of Nature. Now the variety of this corn or rice or wheat is owned by corporation X, and the peasants who have grown this wheat or corn for millennia, and continue to d so, will be prosecuted.
The engineer says the animal can be redesigned for its own good. I heard this in a presentation at a conference on the ethical treatment of farm animals given at Johns Hopkins University by a geneticist and engineer who advocated applying CRISPR technology to chickens in confinement. CRISPR uses a protein to cut an unwanted strand of DNA from the double helix, or it could introduce a strand of DNA with a factor that the operator wants to introduce. In the case of chickens, the engineer suggested that a strand of DNA that would induce an opiate high could be inserted into chickens to make confinement life bearable. Not only is this engineering of Nature repugnant, it and similar uses of CRISPR would lead us down a very dark road where any and all organisms, animal and vegetable, would be subject to the whims of engineers and corporations.
In city design, given the irrational impulse is to cluster together as many businesses as possible, real estate prices rise, which means that office buildings will be as tall as possible, cramming as many people as possible onto floors and into rooms, working like trained monkeys in cubicles. Often these same people live in high rise apartments or condominium complexes, paying exorbitant sums for the privilege. The result is a further atomization of society—the alienation of people from one another, and from the earth. But this mode of working and living is considered rational, for it makes the best use of space, ignoring the fact that it runs counter to human needs, with the consequence that it promotes alienation, which in turn promotes aggression and anti-social behavior.
Ironically, Reason demands predictability. We plug a cord into an outlet and expect a vacuum cleaner to turn on or an iron to heat. We flip a switch and a light goes on. We expect that predictability and efficiency with the internet, and so all of our systems and major institutions—banking and finance, energy, the Defense Department, all major retailers, hospitals, universities, manufacturers, and more—store all their information on it.. We have allowed ourselves to become entirely dependent on the internet, which is the central nervous system of our economic body. Should the internet collapse, so would the economy and all life systems. Our energy grid, for example, is vulnerable to foreign government hacking. Shut down the energy grid and all else collapses. In the meantime, we are dealing with hackers who penetrate company and government computer systems and steal data. We do not know how much Defense Department data has been stolen (we know some has) but we all know that hackers have stolen customers’ social security numbers and banking information from large retail chains.
Reason Begot Technique
Technique, the child of Reason, has released the demonic from the modern psyche, thereby unleashing unbelievable violence upon the world. The causes for this are many, but one is surely the elimination of most meaningful work, with the result that men and women who once had vocations are now working at servile jobs—tending machines, selling insurance, selling goods, working a cash register. This is work to which no one is called. Dominated in so many other ways by omni-present Technique, the mass of people are just that—a mass, a collection. No longer living in community, and alienated from their fellows, deprived of meaningful work, and knowing that they are mere things, their anger boils up. Is it any wonder then that reports of mass killings fill the news almost weekly? It is time that we realized that an individual deprived of meaningful work, locked inside a pressure cooker, will inevitably explode.
Anger and fear of government inspires men and women to stockpile arms and ammunition. White cops murder unarmed black men and women. One black man is shot sixteen times in the back. A young black woman, babysitting her cousin, is shot by a white cop through a window.
Skinheads spray paint swastikas on synagogues. Confederate flags wave at rallies. The Klan rises again. The urge to kill bubbles up.
In a meaningless universe, one is compelled to commit acts of violence and greed just to feel alive. Greed ratchets up. Bankers commit massive fraud, sending tens of thousands of people onto the streets. America’s biggest banks stagger, but the president bails them out and not one banker goes to jail. Knowing themselves to be immune from prosecution, Welles Fargo later sets up thousands of phony accounts and bilks people for the charges. When discovered, Welles Fargo is fined, but again, no one goes to jail. But if caught, there is no shame, no shame is being convicted of a felony, no shame in going to prison, only regret at having been caught.
In a world where Power dictates Right, the morally unfit are appointed to the Supreme Court and a mentally ill and morally depraved man is elected chief executive of the United States.
Right wing foundations fund global warming denial. And while the polar ice caps melt billions are spent on a space program to capture footage of planets, stars, asteroids, galaxies. Technicians anticipate the day we will plant colonies on Mars because Earth has become uninhabitable.
Forty-one million Americans, including 13 million children, struggled with hunger in 2016, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Our sins against humanity multiply.
Our sins against Nature multiply. The Government agency charged with protecting the environment strikes two regulations off the books for every one it enacts. Two hundred species, more or less, go extinct each day around the globe.
Hydraulic fracturing poisons drinking water in Wyoming, California and Pennsylvania.
Since Nature is simply a stockpile of goods, the tops of Appalachian mountains are leveled for coal and the sides of Rocky mountains are sheered in half, top to bottom, for their minerals.
The Elimination of the Human Presence
Now we have artificial intelligence and robots that replace assembly line workers; today we need only supervisors to supervise the robots.
Robots are omni-present. They speak to us when we call a company and have questions about products and services.
We have driverless cars and a stock market where massive trading occurs in nanoseconds on the command of an algorithm. The purposive human being is fast becoming an irrelevance.
Why? Because the individual is a cipher, merely a thing that keeps the economy moving. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are things. The enemy combatant and the suspected enemy combatant are things, therefore we will do with them whatever we want: feed a “lunch tray” of pureed pasta and hummus into their rectums, water board them, do anything we want. We label these acts “renditions” and “enhanced interrogations,” never torture. And we continue to torture even though we know it produces lies. We enjoy it.
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Sartre was wrong: there is an exit. Most will not take it: disengagement from the values and treasures of the Mass, including the core beliefs of rationalists. So long as the active intellect is in charge, there is no exit. The glimmers of an exit lie in discovering access to what Meister Eckhart called the passive intellect. But this calls for surrender, which in turn calls for humility.
But what is the passive intellect?
See my related essay: “Gods of the Modern World”:
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